Hiring a Private Investigator for your app: Application Performance Monitoring

10:30-11:00, Lecture Room 3

It has been a busy several years in monitoring and observability. Logging solutions are widely deployed, from scp+grep to proper federated logging. Collecting centralised server environment and resources metrics has also matured significantly. In this talk we’ll introduce the next layer in this onion - in-depth Application Performance Monitoring (APM). While other parts of the monitoring stack could be described as watchmen, APM plays much more of a detective role, bringing ever more metrics into increasingly complex UIs to suss out performance bottlenecks.

We’ll talk a bit about the history of APM and show an example app being monitored with a free APM system. We’ll reflect on a case study of 2 of the speaker’s old clients, 2 small web technology-driven organisations which struggled with adopting APM. We will look at why that might be and how you could do better. We will then walk through a simple vendor-agnostic approach to choosing an APM vendor.